When Brandon Monk Muñoz moved back to Orange County in 2010, he struggled to find a job. He also needed furniture for his family's empty house. So Muñoz decided to build wood tables to use for furniture and also as prototypes for products he could sell while job hunting.

He pieced together scraps of hardwood to make a butcher block table with ribbons of walnut, mahogany, cherry and oak for his dining room and joined reclaimed vintage floor boards to make a farm table for the backyard. Muñoz even built his family a Christmas tree from a stack of old wooden pallets when money was tight over the holidays.

The results were so attractive and pleasing to his discerning wife that the 35-year-old former art student decided to start a woodworking business, handcrafting tables, benches and other furnishings.

"I like making beauty out of things that are thrown away," Muñoz said.

Muñoz launched his business full time last year. His major investment: $500 for used woodworking tools purchased at an estate sale. Having just returned from seven years of religious ministry work in London and on a tight budget, he also collected salvaged materials and purchased reclaimed wood from local lumber suppliers to keep costs down.

He started sharing the process of making his work on Instagram, posting everything from artfully arranged table clamps and oversized wrenches to mangled church pews and raw slabs of wood he was bringing back to life. Muñoz also posted wooden artwork he created for art walks and galleries in Orange County and Los Angeles – such as a two-dimensional 20-foot shark built to scale and a giant upside down Salvador Dali-style skate ramp that appears to be dripping toward the floor.

The eye-catching photos have earned him a social media following; his Instagram fans swelled to more than 20,000 after the social media site recently featured him as a suggested user.

He thinks that Instagram has been useful in an indirect way. "Somebody sees what I do with my art and they say, oh, I guess you know what you're doing. You can make a table," Muñoz said.

Muñoz also opened a shop on Etsy, a popular online marketplace for handmade goods, where his offerings include "suntanned" poplar tables cut in the shape of California. He'd noticed the inexpensive pale blonde and lime green material turned to chocolate and honey when left out in the sun. By June 2012, he'd made his first sale out of state – a reclaimed farm table shipped to a customer in Georgia. Sales to New York, Texas and Colorado and elsewhere soon followed, and he made everything out of the woodshop in his Fullerton garage.

Etsy has helped grow his business more than 200 percent, Muñoz said, with more than half of his sales now coming from out-of-town buyers.

Customer service also has been a key part of Muñoz's business. Tracey Vito, a customer in Maryland who recently ordered a custom-made reclaimed farm table, says he kept calling and sending emails to make sure every detail was done to her satisfaction. "We must've spoken at least two or three dozen times over the course of three weeks," she said.

Muñoz also forged strong relationships offline working with people like Jeni Maus, owner of Fullerton-based Found Vintage Rentals, which rents out vintage furniture for weddings, events and photo shoots. Muñoz met Maus through a mutual friend when he moved back to Orange County, offering to repair anything in her warehouse full of antiques. A year later, she called on him to do just that and later commissioned dozens of custom reclaimed tables. "He's fantastic," Maus said. "I give his name out all the time and try to give him plugs on social media."

Muñoz's woodworking business, Monkwood Studio, now supports his family, which includes his wife, Pamela, three children and a baby on the way. He's been able to reinvest some of his earnings and buy new tools. He moved into a studio space at the Magoski Arts Colony in downtown Fullerton last month and will participate in the monthly Art Walk on July 5.

He's come a long way in a couple years, and he's happy to have confounded even his own expectations.

"I proved to myself I could do this differently," he said. "I could be more creative with it."

SOCIAL MEDIA AND SMALL BUSINESS

Artist Brandon Monk Muñoz offered four tips on how to build a social media following.

1. Be authentic. "Be yourself in a very strategic, focused way ... so people make a connection with you and what you're doing. You can't fake passion."

2. Be consistent. Use social media daily. "I'm trying to get better at Twitter and others, but Instagram is just so easy and more up my alley because of the photography."

3. Respond. Have a conversation that's about more than just you. "Follow other people who are like-minded. I follow a bunch of woodworkers, and we kind of have this woodworking community on Instagram, mostly just complimenting, sometimes critiquing or asking how they made things."

4. Educate yourself. "I learned social-media strategy partly from reading books like 'Crush It.' It shows you how anything can work if you're just passionate about it. I'm reading 'The Impact Equation' right now. It's more about strategy. You might have the reach, like 20,000 followers, but is your content any good?"

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